Expeditions: Conquistador - Update #20, About the Delay

You may have been wondering what the hell is up. Our website has been down for ages, we’ve been a bit tight-lipped about the reasons for the delay, you’ve started wondering if we sold the game to a social gaming company and moved into a monolithic office building filled wall-to-wall with cubicles.
Let me assure you that this is not the case, and that other than the continued delay, there is only good news.
A week or so ago we let slip on our forums that we’ve signed a deal with bitComposer to bring the game to market. This deal has changed precisely zero things about the game. We didn’t want a publisher to interfere with our product (hence our use of Kickstarter to fund a considerable part of it) and bitComposer didn’t want to interfere with our product, so that all worked out nicely. Just to be absolutely clear, we already had multiplayer done and polished by the time we signed this deal, that was entirely our own decision and bitComposer had nothing to do with it.
bitComposer brings three things to the table: they’ll fund a German localisation if the game sells well enough in English and Spanish, they’ll help us out with marketing, and through them we’ll get access to a greater range of distribution than we could reach on our own, including physical distribution via Amazon as well as in shops. Yeah, apparently some people still buy their games in shops – go figure.
So what’s with the delay? Well as you may have picked up from our embarrassingly uncoordinated attempts to explain it, there is more than one reason for that. First, the delay was because we were talking to bitComposer. Then the delay was because we were waiting to work things out with some major distributors, and though we’re still waiting on that, we expect to be able to release the game this month.
Throughout the delay, we’ve been fixing the new bugs in the Mexico campaign and polishing everything off. Other than bug fixes, the polish mostly took the shape of extra animations (new animations for the horse, turn animations in combat, a cheering audience for the tournament, and so on), a whole lot of interface tweaks (better Info screen layout, some flashes to call attention to resource changes during dialogue or probability changes in the Camp Management screen), a few more sound effects (mainly different GUI sounds so you don’t get sick and tired of that one sharp click we had before), and we even managed to fit in a little more environment art while we were at it.
As for the website, that’s actually completely unrelated to any of this, believe it or not. A friend offered to make us a new website for the game, and he did a very good job on it, but he also accidentally nuked our old WordPress database while he was at it. The new website is done, but it needs a few tweaks to reflect the state of the game. We’ll try to put the finishing touches on the site ourselves and then get logicartists.com redirected until we get around to making a new website for the company.
Thank you for your patience, and please accept our profound apologies for the delay and the vagueness. If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments, and we’ll answer everything that we actually know the answer for, scout’s honour.

Looks like an original game - missed it on Kickstarter, but nice to see they've found a publisher and were able to set their own terms. One might wish that some of the Kickstarter audience had a bit more understanding of the pragmatics of developing an indie game. Judging by the comments, a lot of these guys seem to imagine that Kickstarting an Indie game is little different to buying something on Amazon.

I backed this game on kickstarter. Played the beta only shortly to get a feel of the game but not too much (I'd rather play a more polished final product)…Seems to live up to what I was expecting. Really looking forward to it.

I doubt its because they ran out of money since the product was pretty much finished. I think its only to be able to market it more properly? Publisher will allow them to fund a German translation and allow them to get on store shelves…and probably get on steam without having to go through greenlight. From what I understand the German market is a pretty good one for PC games.

I see it more as a business decision. In this case the publisher probably won't cost them much since the said publisher didn't have to risk/invest anything in the game development.

Interestingly, the xenonauts developers got rejected by gog.com for being too expensive. Dont know what they plan to charge but gog has been selling full price games and some stuff on their I think is too overpriced for 10-15 year old games. For all I know Expeditions had the same problem with gog perhaps getting too big.